CoP-28 is turning into a trade show and that is not bad news

Business self-interest is converging with what's best for the planet

- DAVID FICKLING

There’s a common lament across the halls of Expo City Dubai, the 1,000-acre venue of CoP-28, the climate huddle: This event feels more like a slick trade show than an environmental summit.

About 100,000 attendees—nearly three times the number who attended CoP-26 in Glasgow—are milling through the venue. Fossil fuel companies have more than 2,000 representatives in attendance, including Sultan Al Jaber, president of the conference and the chief executive officer of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the UAE’s state-owned petroleum business. Lavish provision of food, drink, events and golf buggies to ferry delegates around the vast site make it feel as much like an industry conference in Las Vegas as a sobering reckoning with environmental catastrophe.

Climate activism, meet capitalism. You two should get to know each other better: Since the Industrial Revolution, our civilization has been built around fossil fuels. Fixing the resultant emissions is like digging out the foundations of the global economy and resetting them on a new, cleaner footing. It’s a stroke of luck that we now have most of the technologies needed to achieve this objective at a lower cost than the carbon-intensive alternative. Building that new economy will need one of the biggest splurges of peace-time investment the world has ever seen.